klaus janson

Around Halloween, there is nothing I like more than a comic where horror elements start to creep in when they clearly have no business being there. I mean, I'll gladly read eighty issues of Tomb of Dracula and I love plenty of comics that are just Hellboy grumping at werewolves, but if you give me a comic where all the spookums and haints show up out of nowhere and start hassling Spider-Man or somebody, I am delighted. That's why I was pretty interested when pal and occasional ComicsAlliance contributor Kevin Church suggested that I add Star Trek #4 to my annual scareathon, mostly because he sold me on it by telling me it was the comic where the starship Enterprise found a haunted house. In space.

He wasn't kidding: This is a Star Trek comic where the Enterprise finds a haunted house in space. And that's after Dracula shows up.

Okay, so there's good news and bad news. The good news is that ComiXology is having a massive sale on Batman comics, and has knocked a bunch of them down to 99¢ each, which means that you can grab some great stories on the cheap. The bad news? Since this whole thing is in honor of Batman's 75th anniversary, they've put 750 comics on sale, plus a handful of graphic novel collections. All things considered, that's a pretty good problem to have, but still, that can be pretty overwhelming.

Fortunately, we're here to help. As the World's Foremost Batmanologist, I've sifted through the sale to bring you safe bets for what you should be grabbing during the sale. Assuming you've got the obvious ones -- like The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One and the recent runs by Morrison, Snyder, and Capullo -- here's what to grab next!

Top DC Comics writer Geoff Johns is collaborating with longtime Marvel Comics visionary John Romita, Jr. for a new run on Superman. They will be joined by frequent Romita collaborator Klaus Janson, a legendary artist in his own right. The move returns Johns to a Man of Steel solo title for the first time in this decade, following an extremely good run of stories in Action Comics in the late 2000s.

A new volume of Batman: Black and White kicked off last week, continuing the DC Comics anthology's tradition of high quality. Debuting in 1996, the original Batman: Black and White series quickly set the comics world ablaze with a collection of short, powerful tales told by some of the industry's finest. Edited by Mark Chiarello, the four issues gathered sixteen original eight-page black and white stories from a who’s who of influential creators, including Archie Goodwin, Joe Kubert, Howard Chaykin, Brian Bolland, Bill Sienkiewicz, Neil Gaiman, and several more. It won the Eisner Awards for “Best Short Story” and “Best Anthology,” inspired a ton of great statues (one of which you can win), and two follow-up volumes in 2002 and 2007, mostly made up of backup stories from the Batman: Gotham Knights series.

In celebration of the new series, I read all three volumes of Batman: Black and White (I also did other stuff, I have a life), and after poring over all 600-plus pages, I can confidently say that these are the ten best stories from the original volumes, presented here in chronological order.

For the past decade or so, it's almost been a necessity for Captain America to serve as a kind of barometer of the national mood. He fought terrorists in the Middle East, searched for weapons of mass destruction, dealt with angry protest groups, quelled election anxieties, and even surrendered and died when a political rift between heroes grew too wide. It's

If you didn't get enough of Brian Bendis writing about Marvel's Man Without Fear in his 55-issue run on Daredevil, then you are in luck: Next month, Bendis, along with co-writer David Mack and artists Klaus Janson, Bill Sienkiewicz and Alex Maleev return to Daredevil for End of Days.

Having gifted the comics and cartooning communities with such prodigious talents as James Jean, Kyle Baker, Phil Jimenez, Peter Bagge and the legendary Archie Goodwin himself, it was only appropriate that New York's School of Visual Arts produce its own comics magazine. Titled INK, the

We've seen some pretty big sums of money dropped in the last year or so on rare Golden Age comics like Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman, and Detective Comics #27, the first appearance of Batman, both of which sold for over a million dollars each. Impressive and record-breaking sums to be sure, but not that surprising for two of the most sought after comics in history.

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